CORRECTION FLUID
Second only to prayer when it came to ensuring error-free correspondence.
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Once upon a time, you kept a little odiferous bottle in your desk that could make so many problems fade away.
You also probably had a container of correction fluid.
In the days before the invention of the word processor, a row of Xs or a bottle of Wite-Out were the two easiest ways to correct a typo. The history of correction fluid contains the story of one of the twentieth century's most successful female entrepreneurs. Bette Nesmith Graham, a typist at a bank in Texas, started using white tempera paint in the 1950s to cover up typing errors after she saw how the Christmas window painters at the bank where she worked simply painted over their mistakes. Other secretaries caught on to Ms. Graham's little secret and asked her to make bottles for them, too. After consulting with a chemistry teacher and a paint manufacturer, she perfected the formula, bottled it at home with the help of her son, and began selling it. She first called her creation Mistake Out, but then changed it to Liquid Paper. By the late 1960s, her company had expanded to a factory and was seeing sales of more than a million bottles a year. When she sold the company in 1979, Ms. Graham pocketed more than $47 million (much of which eventually went to her son, Michael Nesmith, a.k.a. the wool-hat wearing member of the Monkees). There were big things in store for the company. Heyhey, correction pens!
Early versions of Liquid Paper and its main competitor, Wite-Out (1971), were far from perfect. They required multiple coats in order to be truly opaque; they needed considerable time to dry, and it was easy to see the original mistake under the white covering if you held the document up to the light. The various brands of correction fluid would also smudge when they came in contact with the requisite spelling-error induced tears. Non-water-soluble versions hit the market in the 80s, but the containers had a tendency to dry out quickly, resulting in crusty bits around the top of the bottle that would inevitably end up stuck onto your page. Other times, the application brush would clump up with the product, sometimes getting so dry inside the bottle that the stem refused to come out at all. (Those were times when that other bottle came in handy.)
Brush-on correction fluid wasn't the only player in the typo-mending market. There was Ko-Rec-Type correction film, which, when placed atop the sheet of paper in your typewriter and struck with a letter key, put a precisely shaped white patch over the error-but it wasn't much help if a mistake was more than a word or two. Some brands of paper were purposefully formulated so that they wouldn't completely absorb the ribbon's ink, meaning that you could do a decent job of rubbing out mistakes with an eraser. There was also correction tape on rollers which could dispense a thin layer of dry white film on top of any errors. The era of the word processor then brought us typewriter hybrids that allowed you to read chunks of text on a screen before committing them to paper, and even sometimes came equipped with erasable ink.
But these options couldn't be used as nail polish or as a semi-permanent way to declare who hearted whom on a bathroom door. Nothing could quite compare to a form of error-management that was so elegant in its simplicity and quaint in its ability to only fix mess-ups of minimal size and scope. For most of its lifetime, correction fluid came in only one color, meaning that mistakes made on anything but white paper were all but unfixable. Typos that were larger than a letter or a word or two would result in a slew of sentences that no longerlined up. Despite all kinds of clever maneuvering, this usually meant that all the pages in the document had to be retyped. We were, perhaps, less used to perfection: sometimes it was easier just to live with a slightly awkward sentence than to retype page upon page or slather on coats of correction fluid. Indeed, it was a mistake-repair system that had more of a resemblance to our problem-solving patterns in the non-two-dimensional world than the backspace button. Sometimes it's worth putting in Herculean effort to fix something; sometimes it isn't. Going back and revisiting a mistake, in any case, is rarely easy.
Now, however, it's tempting to blind ourselves to the laws of cause and effect by walking around trying to find the undo button to press when we get into a fender bender or wake up hungover. In the days of correction fluid, we weren't yet plagued with the notion that a quick finger tap could fix everything. You couldn't just backspace your problems. Maybe you could fix things. Maybe you couldn't. Or maybe you'd end up using your fingernail to scrape white stuff off the photocopier glass.
So be it.
